Visual context of nature and urban environments and their ability to distract from a task at hand - the role of visual features, visual discomfort, fascination and aesthetic preferences

Exposure to nature is generally accepted to benefit people’s cognition, health, and wellbeing compared to exposure to urban areas; an effect that can even be seen when exposed to visual images only. Here, we explore what underlies differences in attentional demands: low-level image statistics, higher-level perceptual factors such as an environment’s aesthetic or comfort properties, or an environment’s gist? We asked participants to perform a shape discrimination task to explore how low-level basic image statistics (e.g. spatial frequency, colour) and higher-level perceptual factors (e.g. semantic information, liking, fascination and visual discomfort) of task-irrelevant nature and urban distractors impacts task-performance. Findings suggest that visual properties of task-irrelevant information affect distractibility in a hierarchical manner, with semantic information of task-irrelevant scenes having the highest impact. Against predictions from the literature, mediation analysis revealed that neither environment type nor visual discomfort, liking or fascination were predictive of performance outcomes. Rather, we find that it is accessibility to semantic content that plays the key role in shaping attentional behaviour.